Emma
Minus Its Narrator: Decorum and Class Consciousness in
Film Versions of the Novel

SARAH R.
MORRISON

Sarah R.
Morrison (email: s.morrison@morehead-st.edu) is an Associate Professor of
English at Morehead State University in Morehead,
Kentucky. Her essay on men in Jane Austens novels
appeared in Studies in the Novel. She has also
published on Samuel Johnson and has an essay on Milton
forthcoming in a book collection.

Some film versions of Jane Austen's
novels are amazingly free adaptations (notably the 1940 MGM Pride
and Prejudice with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier and the
1985 BBC Sense and Sensibility).1
Although more recent productions also introduce scenes and
dialogue not to be found in the novels, most of the newer film
versions stay close to the plot and original dialogue: they thus
provide an opportunity for isolating those distinctive qualities
of an Austen novel that cannot easily be translated into the
medium of film. There are of course a number of practical
considerations in adapting a novel for film: reducing the number
of characters may make staging more manageable; simplifying the
plot may be justified out of consideration for the viewing
audience; and cutting some elements is unavoidable even when the
performance is allowed to go to the six hours of the
Davies-Langton Pride and Prejudice starring Jennifer Ehle
and Colin Firth (1995). Most interesting, however, are those
invented scenes and bits of dialogue not found in the novels.

It is in such marked departures from the novels that we can
detect filmmakers struggling with the differences in the two
mediaand in particular, with the lack of a
narratorand can determine as well how mindful they are of a
modern audience's need to be educated in terms of the social
customs and class values of Austen's time. My goal is not to
critique the film versions so much as to learn more about
Austen's narrative technique from a comparison of the novels with
their film versions. Although I will begin with a few key scenes
from adaptations of other Austen novels, my primary focus will be
upon Emma and three film versions of that novel: the 1972
Constanduros-Glenister BBC production; the 1996 Davies-Lawrence
Meridian and A&E version starring Kate Beckinsale; and the
1996 McGrath Miramax Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Film and literary critics recognize that "certain kinds
of novels are . . . more adaptable to film than others; and this
'adaptability' is generally" seen as "a function of the
extent to which the novel presents the interior worlds of its
characters" (Huselberg 61). The novel of manners as it
emphasizes manners and social settings seems ideally suited to
film adaptation. Certainly, critics have long been fond of
observing Austen's novels' affinity with dramatic representation.
Some scenes come all but ready-made from the novels, consisting
almost entirely of dialogue with interspersed narrative
commentary that is little more than stage direction. (The
conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in the opening chapter
of Pride and Prejudice is a prime example.) The novel of
manners, however, "examines the psyche of the
individual" as well as "the social world in which the
individual lives" (Brothers and Bowers 4). Austen's novels
place the heroine's subjective experience center-stage. Thus,
even as the novels translate smoothly into film in certain
respects, their emphasis upon "the interior worlds" of
the heroines poses a challenge to filmmakers. In particular, film
versions of Austen's novels must somehow compensate for the
absence of the witty and intrusive narrator who negotiates the
space between the heroine's subjective experience, other
characters' perspectives, and something that may be called
"objective" reality.2

None of the film versions I know of makes extensive use of a
narrator, though the McGrath Emma does begin with
stage-setting commentary (interestingly not taken from the
novel) delivered by a disembodied voice, and this voice returns
at the close of the film to offer lines recognizable from the
concluding chapter of the novel. (In this version also, Mrs.
Elton addresses her criticisms of Emma's and Mr. Knightley's
wedding directly to the camera.) By framing the
"narrative" of the film in this fashion, the filmmakers
are acknowledging the need for (or at least the desirability of
having) some over-arching authoritative consciousness that
complicates point of view from the outset, sending an early
signal to the audience to restrain its sympathetic involvement in
the characters', and especially the heroine's, lives. More
typically filmmakers create scenes and add dialogue to fill in
gaps in the narrative that result from the excision of a narrator
and assign essential bits of exposition and narrative commentary
to charactersoften somewhat awkwardly and implausibly and
sometimes with actual impropriety. A character can never possess
the kind of authority belonging to an omniscient narrator, of
course, and a witty or profound generalization delivered by the
narrator may come across as pert or pompous when pronounced by a
character. The famous opening of Pride and Prejudice, for
example, (omitted from the 1940 film version) is preserved in
clumsy fashion in both the Davies-Langton and the Weldon-Coke
(1979) versions of Pride and Prejudice. The Davies-Langton
version shows the just-introduced Bennet family leaving church
and has Elizabeth rather cheekily interpose the shortened
observation that "a single man in possession of a good
fortune must be in want of a wife" as Mrs. Bennet exults to
Mr. Bennet over Mr. Bingley's arrival in the neighborhood. An
early scene in the Weldon-Coke version divides the full passage
(including the qualifier "However little known the feelings
or views of such a man may be . . .") between Elizabeth and
Charlotte Lucas as rather "stagey" dialogue. The
scriptwriter takes advantage of the opportunity to work in
material from Elizabeth and Charlotte's later conversation about
the progress of Jane and Bingley's romance and "Happiness in
marriage," with some references to the incompatibility of
Mr. and Mrs. Bennet also thrown in (PP 3 and 23).

In addition to placing essential narrative commentary in the
mouth of a character, most often the heroine, filmmakers
regularly transfer one character's speeches to another character
in the interests of consolidating material and reducing the
number of scenes. Often dialogue from several different scenes is
combined and delivered in a larger social grouping rather than
tête-à-tête. In the Davies-Lawrence Emma, for example,
Mr. Knightley's criticisms of Frank Churchill, expressed
privately to Emma in the novel, are in the interests of economy
mixed in with a discussion of Frank's postponed visit before a
full company assembled at the Westons'. The film has Mr.
Knightley within hearing of the entire group collected at table
state flatly, "He should have come before this," and
then direct to Mrs. Weston the comment, "To speak bluntly,
mum, it is his plain duty to his father and to you." At this
same dinner party, Emma openly speculates upon Frank Churchill as
a possible mate. When she says that "By all accounts, he
seems to be the very epitome of manly excellence" (a
sentence that sounds distressingly more as if it had come from
one of the Misses Steele than Emma Woodhouse), Mr. Knightley
sourly responds, "Apart from his disinclination to exert
himself and do what he knows to be right." Likewise, in this
film version, Mr. Knightley's muttered comment "to
himself"  "'Hum! just the trifling, silly fellow
I took him for'" (E 206)  is overheard not just
by Emma, as in the novel, but by Mr. and Mrs. Weston, Mr.
Woodhouse, Harriet Smith and Emma, all assembled at Hartfield,
along with the added loud exclamations, "To get his hair
cut!" and "Foppery and nonsense!" In so shifting
speeches, filmmakers are not always sensitive to the difference
between a confidential disclosure and a public pronouncement.
These seemingly slight alterations make this Mr. Knightley less
courteous and less sensitive to others' feelings than he appears
in the novel, where, critics generally agree, he functions as a
moral authority and model. The Constanduros-Glenister Emma,
which runs to 257 minutes, in general resists cutting or
combining scenes. Although it leaves out the brief discussion
with Mrs. Weston in which Emma criticizes Frank for failing to
pay the long-awaited visit, this version retains the intense
private conversation in which Emma defends Frank's conduct to Mr.
Knightley, pleading the young man's unusual circumstances. The
McGrath adaptation simply sidesteps the entire issue.

The above difficulties are compounded by the need to have
characters give direct expression (if only in a voice-over) to
feelings left unexpressed in the novels, to thoughts never shared
with another, and sometimes never even privately acknowledged at
a conscious level. Filmmakers, not always sensitive to notions of
decorum, often merely convert such half-thoughts to speech. At
its worst, this tactic results in "totally unconvincing
dialogue" used "to express what [the film] cannot
easily visualize," with "Characters baldly tell[ing]
each other what their spiritual states are" (Lellis and
Bolton 46). Only a few such "adjustments" are jarring,
but collectively they too may alter tone and emphasis as well as
affect characterization, redefining the heroine and her dilemma,
and thus similarly undermine overt themes of the novel concerning
decorum and social forms. Austen marks all her characters by
their awareness of social forms as well as by the motives behind
their observance ofor violation ofrules of decorum.
The public expression of thoughts that can be shared only in
intimate conversation (and sometimes not with propriety even
then) can mimic this tactic and work against the larger tendency
of the film which struggles to embody the spirit of the novel. Persuasion,
with its isolated and repressed heroine, is as Nancy Hendrickson
observes extremely "problematic for the dramatist"
(64). Hendrickson faults the Mitchell-Baker Persuasion
(1971), for instance, where "Anne is forced to confide her
secrets in Lady Russell . . . in order to make her feelings clear
to the audience" (64). Similarly, the Emma of the McGrath
adaptation confides not only the secrets of her own heart to Mrs.
Weston but, quite ungenerously, those of Harriet Smith as well.
The Dear-Michell film version of Persuasion (1995) offers
another striking example of a character's private reflections
inappropriately converted to dialogue. In one scene, Sir Walter
objects in strong language to Anne keeping a prior engagement
with Mrs. Smith instead of accompanying her father and sister to
Lady Dalrymple's. In the novel, we are merely told,

Mrs. Clay, who had been present while all this passed,
now thought it advisable to leave the room, and Anne
could have said much and did long to say a little, in
defence of her friend's not very dissimilar
claims to theirs, but her sense of personal respect to
her father prevented her. She made no reply. She left it
to himself to recollect, that Mrs. Smith was not the only
widow in Bath between thirty and forty, with little to
live on, and no sirname of dignity. (P 158)

The Dear-Michell film version has Anne retort in anger to Sir
Walter, whereas Austen's narrator makes it abundantly clear that
Anne would never presume to dispute with her father upon such
terms of absolute equality.

Even a sotto voce comment or a thought delivered in a
voice-over can be problematic. Austen has been criticized for
"render[ing] mental life only in grammatical sentences"
and not representing "the pre-conscious stages of
thought" (Dussinger 104). Yet Austen's narrative techniques,
though far removed from stream of consciousness, reach beneath
the surface not merely to portray concealed meanings and
motivation but to suggest repressed feelings and unacknowledged
impulses. Interior views of characters that subtly suggest
psychological depths below or beyond the level of conscious
thought are routinely filtered through the narrator. A false note
enters the film versions of the novels when these are converted
to dialogue and characters boldly deliver speeches containing
sentiments that in the novels they are struggling to suppress.
The voice-over works well only for well-articulated thoughts at a
quite conscious level. The Weldon-Coke version of Pride and
Prejudice assigns many essential bits of narrative commentary
to characters to aid with exposition, but this version, like the
McGrath Emma, also makes fairly extensive use of
voice-overs to convey the heroine's thoughts. When Elizabeth
reads Darcy's letter, when she looks at his portrait at
Pemberley, and when she wonders whether she is "still dear
to him" (PP 253) and concludes (too late, she thinks)
that he is "exactly the man, who, in disposition and
talents, would most suit her" (PP 312), voice-overs
accurately convey her state of mind. The voice-over is quite
inappropriately used, however, in a scene that derives from the
narrative commentary that opens chapter 19 of volume 2 of Pride
and Prejudice. Here the narrator observes that Elizabeth
"had never been blind to the impropriety of her father's
behaviour as a husband" and notes that "she had never
felt so strongly as now, the disadvantages which must attend the
children of so unsuitable a marriage" (PP 236). In
the Weldon-Coke film, Elizabeth, sitting in a chair sewing,
rather coolly observes her parents as her father seeks solace in
a book and her mother frolics and giggles in the background with
Kitty. The film transforms Elizabeth's repressed thoughts into
judgmental reflections upon her father and mother's deficiencies,
and Elizabeth's unbidden and painful perceptions become freely
indulged censoriousness. By contrast, Austen filters Elizabeth's
painful awareness of her parents' unsuitableness as husband and
wife through the narrator, and this tactic both validates the
correctness of Elizabeth's understanding and underscores her
quite proper reluctance to indulge in such thoughts.

Invented action is also used by filmmakers (often effectively
but not always appropriately) to convey characters' emotional
states when the novel relies primarily on passages of free
indirect thought or narrative commentary. Hendrickson, who
believes that in the Dear-Michell Persuasion
"Austen's characters are entirely stripped of
gentility" (65), focuses on the concert scene, where Anne,
"feel[ing] she is stretching the limits of decorum . . .
maneuvers herself into an aisle seat where she will be accessible
to Captain Wentworth should he choose to approach her"
(65-66). Hendrickson complains that

Michell's Anne is plagued by no such scruples. She
chases Captain Wentworth up the aisle of the concert hall
and, when he tries to keep going, she actually jumps in
front of him, blocking his path. An Anne capable of such
bold behavior loses her rationale for having suffered in
silence seven long years. (66)

Similarly, in fashioning a scene at Hartfield in which Emma
breaks the news of her engagement to Mr. Knightley to Harriet in
person, the McGrath Emma seeks a visual equivalent to
Emma's painful reflections. In the film, after Harriet rushes in
tears from the room, Mr. Knightley enters to comfort Emma. The
viewer is placed outside the window and hears nothing of what has
been said. But in the novel, when a joyful Emma first realizes
that Mr. Knightley is declaring his love for her, not
Harriet, we are told by the narrator

And not only was there time for these convictions,
with all their glow of attendant happiness; there was
time also to rejoice that Harriet's secret had not
escaped her, and to resolve that it need not and should
not. It was all the service she could now render
her poor friend. (E 431)

And in the novel, Emma deliberately chooses to communicate the
unwelcome news to Harriet by letter, sparing Harriet as well as
herself an emotional scene. The filmmakers here sacrifice Emma's
delicate attention to her friend's feelings and instead operate
according to the principle (everywhere mocked by Austen) that a display
of feeling is the more convincing evidence of deeply felt
emotion. The difference in medium often makes the filmmakers'
choices understandable, but these scenes are nonetheless jarring,
for they violate the novels insistent emphasis upon the spirit
which rules of decorum ideally embody.

Not only do filmmakers inadvertently introduce violations of
decorum that run counter to characterization and theme in the
novels, but they deliberately and consistently undermine notions
of decorum grounded in class distinctions which the novels in
fact support. In adapting any Austen novel, filmmakers are faced
with the difficult choice of either educating a modern,
democratic audience in the social rules of the day and
accustoming them to a rigid class system they will almost
assuredly find distasteful, or ahistorically adjusting these
rules and making what Austen presents as a reasonable degree of
respect for the class structure an automatic flaw in a character
and evidence of snobbery; often we find an uneasy compromise
between these two solutions. Film versions of Emma
especially wrestle with this problem. As Carol M. Dole observes,
"On its most obvious level, Austen's Emma is a witty
satire whose chief target is snobbery . . . Accompanying the
novel's attack on snobbery, however, is an underlying attitude
that class distinctions are proper and even beneficial"
(67). Certainly, it is easy for a modern audience to recognize
Emma's snobbishness, but it is very difficult for filmmakers to
convey the precise terms of Emma's error and subsequent
self-recriminations and reformation without substituting more
democratic notions of social equality for the class distinctions
that Austen accepts as appropriate if not positively desirable.
As Dole points out, the "solidly British" film
adaptations of Austen's novels "take the hardest look at
class, while the mainstream American films tend on the surface to
ridicule class snobbery but on a deeper level to ratify class
divisions" (60). Emma's consciousness of her superior social
position is made to appear laughably "silly" in the
McGrath Emma (Dole 69), which reflects American discomfort
in dealing with the issue of class at all. But even the British
Davies-Lawrence Emma treats the heroine's "value for
rank distinctions" as a serious moral "flaw" (71).
Both versions present her revolution of thought as total.

Adaptations of Emma regularly introduce more democratically
conceived scenes and lines not found in the novel. In altering
the lesson that Emma learns and substituting more democratic
notions, film versions of Emma pander to viewers'
fantasies of a classless society and distort not only the novel
but social reality. One slight example of the complicated nature
of the problem can be found in attempts to film the scene in
which Harriet and Emma encounter Robert Martin on a walk. In the
McGrath Emma, Harriet, without any signal from Emma,
presumes to introduce Emma to her friend, as if such
introductions are a matter of course. The Constanduros-Glenister
and Davies-Lawrence adaptations of Emma, by contrast,
adhere to the novel in omitting the introduction and merely
having Emma wait at a distance while Harriet and Robert Martin
speak brieflybut of course here the filmmakers run the risk
of having viewers mistakenly attribute greater rudeness to
Emma than she is guilty of. We may here recall Elizabeth's horror
at Mr. Collins' determination to introduce himself to Mr. Darcy
and her reminder to her cousin that "it must belong to Mr.
Darcy, the superior in consequence, to begin the
acquaintance" (PP 97).

Dole notes the particular difficulty filmmakers' experience in
dealing with "Emma's final disposal of Harriet as a
friend" (69). The Constanduros-Glenister version preserves
the scene in which Mr. Knightley informs Emma of Harriet's
engagement to Robert Martin; the Davies-Lawrence and the McGrath
versions allow Harriet herself to tell Emma the news. But the
Constanduros-Glenister version has Harriet subsequently call at
Hartfield in the company of Robert Martin to make a formal
introduction to Emma, thus equally suggesting the continuation of
their intimacy. The Davies-Lawrence version of Emma goes
yet further and in so doing provides another excellent example of
the problem and one questionable solution. The "invented
scene that closes the film, the harvest supper" for Mr.
Knightley's tenants and friendsuseful because it plausibly
brings together people of all ranks"presents a fantasy
of genial class intermingling that has no precedent in Austen's
novels" (Dole 71-72). Here we see a reformed Emma seek out
the acquaintance of Robert Martin and invite him and Harriet to
"visit." The foundation for this scene can perhaps be
found in the line in the final chapter that speaks of "Emma
bec[oming] acquainted with Robert Martin, who was now introduced
at Hartfield" (E 482). Yet this passage follows:

Harriet, necessarily drawn away by her engagements
with the Martins, was less and less at Hartfield; which
was not to be regretted.The intimacy between her
and Emma must sink; their friendship must change into a
calmer sort of goodwill; and, fortunately, what ought to
be, and must be, seemed already beginning, and in the
most gradual, natural manner. (482)

This "necessity" will not be apparent to a modern
reader. Yet Austen not only makes it clear that Emma and Harriet
will not continue to move in the same circle but expects her
readers to see the divergence of their paths as inevitable. We
are not that far from the Emma who announced to Harriet, "'I
could not have visited Mrs. Robert Martin, of Abbey-Mill
Farm'" (E 53). Now, when Emma utters comments
such as this one, she is to be faulted, but the fault lies not in
Emma's class consciousness so much as in the smug complacency
behind it, the low motive of influencing Harriet against the
impulses of her own heart, and the insensitivity that does not
check the open expression of such a view to Harriet, whose social
standing is far from secure. The above elegiac passage, coming
late in the novel and dressed in the narrator's voice, seems to
express Emma's understanding of the truth it contains, but
Austen very carefully does not have Emma say as much even
to Mr. Knightley, nor does she make it a conscious
reflection on Emma's part. It is a "truth" presently as
tacitly recognized by all, including the heroine.

The novel relies heavily upon interior views of Emma,
initially to emphasize the gulf between Emma's words and actions
and the sentiments she conceals, but later (as in her penitential
visit to Miss Bates after the Box Hill episode) to underscore her
greater sincerity. These interior views shade from interior
monologues to unembellished free indirect thought (i.e., the
equivalent of a monologue cast in the third person) to passages
of what J. F. Burrows terms "character narrative" (87)
which blend in a variety of creative ways the represented
thoughts or emotions of a character with the interpreting
consciousness of the narrator. In Emma as in the other
novels, the narrator frequently serves as a buffer that allows
Austen to convey subconscious or pre-conscious
motives and states of knowing and thereby to separate even a
heroine in error from the crassly and consciously manipulative
characters in the novels. Film cannot easily duplicate such a
complicated and subtle effect.

Interestingly, the difficulty of "translating" the
social milieu of the novels into terms understandable and
palatable to a twentieth-century audience also stems, at least in
part, from the lack of a narrator. All the novels demonstrate
that the specific social context and the relative social standing
of characters may considerably alter the import of an action or
utterance. Austen discriminates clearly between opinions or
sentiments that may be publicly expressed with propriety, those
that should be shared only in private conversation with
intimates, and those that ought to remain unexpressed to others.
Further, Austen's narrative technique recognizes a difference
between conscious thought reveled in and a more generalized kind
of knowledge or awareness. It is the first that often carries
imputations of moral weakness. (Emma is not to be blamed, for
instance, for noticing the deficiencies of a range of
characters from Miss Bates to Mr. and Mrs. Elton to the
up-and-coming Coles, but she fuels her sense of superiority by dwelling
upon them.) Filmmakers too casually transfer what is a
confidential statement in the novel to a more public setting. And
understandably, without the luxury of a narrator, they often feel
compelled to convert characters' private reflection and
less-than-conscious impressions and impulses to open expression.
In so doing, they disrupt the fine gradations on Austen's moral
scale. Allowances must be made for the differences in the two
media. Nonetheless, the adaptations of Austen's novels can, in
general, be faulted for not considering more carefully the
effects Austen achieves by deploying interior monologue, free
indirect thought, and narrative commentary and summary in place
of dramatic representation in the proportions and precise
locations she does, particularly as these relate to themes of
decorum in the novels.

Notes

1The 1940 MGM Pride and
Prejudice starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier
eliminates Mrs. Hurst and, more surprisingly, does away with
Elizabeth's visit to Pemberley and makes Lady Catherine a
matchmaker conniving at Darcy's and Elizabeths marriage
(Lawson-Peebles 10-12). So many new scenes are added to the 1985
BBC Sense and Sensibility and so much dialogue tampered
with that it is hard even to hazard a guess about the reasons
behind this or that particular departure from the novel. The more
recent (and commercially successful) Emma Thompson and Ang Lee Sense
and Sensibility (1995) also takes liberties with the novel's
plot and dialogue and greatly amplifies the characterization of
key male figures. Nonetheless, it is much easier to connect the
adjustments in the Thompson-Lee film adaptation to specific
scenes and passages in the novel.

2Nora Nachumi's "'As If!'
Translating Austen's Ironic Narrator to Film" does not
directly consider the function of the narrator in the novels.
Rather, her starting point is the assumption that much of the
ironic perspective of the novels is due to Austen's narrator.
Nachumi then focuses on the dialogue, staging, etc., in the
screenplays to see how the filmmakers infuse irony into the film
versions of the novels.